A Species of Art

Vadim

My newest client, a short, skinny guy with a pointy face, stood with his arms crossed as I collected crime evidence in his breakfast nook where an empty oak table looked sad next to the window. “It’s not a plant,” Owen told me for the second time. “And it’s worth about forty grand.”

My eyebrows wanted to rise, but I have a good poker face. I charged a twenty percent commission on found items. Plus expenses. This Owen already put up the non-refundable retainer on a credit card. And I intended to call his missing weird thing a plant a few more times just to annoy him.

“You’re a snoop, a real reporter, so why do you need me?” I asked as I scanned for traces of DNA that didn’t match him or his wife or his useless pit bull.

“Other pressing responsibilities. There’s deadlines, stories that pay. This business may not, so I don’t have the time.” He frowned. “Or a DNA…thing,” he added as he pointed to my biologic code decipher that I wanded over his carpet.

His security cams told the story of the intruder, masked and in coveralls, busting through the back sliding glass door, petting his dog, awkwardly wrestling the plant (or whatever) to a motor-dolly, and then rolling out.

I got a ping for a full DNA collection and my palette screen popped up a rendition of a face at age thirty, cycling through hair and beard styles: white guy, blue eyes, black hair, full lips, and a wide nose.

“That’s gotta be him,” he said. “He’s not one of our friends.”

It could be the guy who’s fucking your wife, I thought, but I didn’t say that. I tagged the DNA code as a suspect.

“Couldn’t the thieves have some genetic procedure after the deed to make this whole exercise pointless?” he asked.

“Nah.” I shook my head. “It would no longer be an exact match, of course, but if someone had a gene switch for eye color or a bigger dong, well, cosmetics takes up a very small part of the whole code.”

“Right, okay.” His pinched expression told me he thought I was crude.

“He came in here all covered up, clean-room style. Nothing is fool-proof, though. If he was sly, he would’ve dropped some skin flakes from someone he don’t like. This is just a starting point.”

Owen frowned at that news. I charged extra for scanning the path from the glass door to the nook. My honesty is free.

The rest of the DNA I picked up Owen verified as friends or relatives.

Back at my office I pulled up photos of the stolen item: three intersecting rings of flesh covered in dark blue feathers spotted with black, the top ring with bird heads that sang. Weird. And sorta pretty, I guess. I did a deep web dive into this new art world, species art. The dark web, the prime market for illegal sales, was where this bird plant of Owen’s would pop up. I scrolled past a lot of odd stuff. Toad skin you could lick, that changed colors and glowed as you tripped. The brainless sex dolls that I marked for later research. There was a venomous Medusa head on crab legs. A better guard than that dog of his.

I cranked up my artificial ID crypto accounts and started shopping, looking for sellers likely to acquire Owen’s plant.

#

Owen

The smart but sleazy investigator had left me alone with the mess. My wife Brea would be home soon, so I needed to tidy up. I didn’t want the mess of the invasion to spin her into a panic.

It had been over a year since I acquired this art species from Pascale, the genetic artist credited with unlocking longevity for art of the flesh. Before his ground-breaking work, vat-grown art pieces might only live for a day. At the exhibition at the Luhring Augustine, Pascale unveiled the first species art that had survived over three weeks. And it was big, standing nearly three meters. Two feathered rings intersected and fused about a trunk that thickened before sinking into the terracotta nutrient pot. The top ring sang a chorus of birdsong from dozens of sparrow-heads sprouting from a ridge that crested the apex. The lower ring fluttered its peacock feathers in dark blues, greens, and reds.

It still survives to this day at a gallery in MoMA. I had scored an interview with Pascale that very night. I asked, “Is this somewhat cruel? The tiny bird heads trapped in flesh and anchored to a pot—”

“Rubbish!” he snapped. He stroked his living lizard skin jacket’s lapels, carefully avoiding the blinking black eyeballs as he softened his expression. “Trapped, indeed. Is your head ‘trapped’ on your neck? They were born the way they are and have no other notions! They sing in joy when they see light, they fall peacefully asleep when darkness returns.”

Pascale removed a covering sheet from one of his works in the corner. Amid blue feathers, tiny bird eyes blinked awake in the white light of the studio. Three intersecting circles stood a half-meter across, the bottom two branching into the supporting trunk. The beaks, one by one, began to sing.

“Not a gift, of course, no, you’re an honest journalist,” said Pascale. “But maybe for a future story? Tell your readers about it in a year’s time?”

The bird DNA had been procured from pied butcherbirds, so my wife Brea named him Butch. I took Pascale’s suggestion and later penned an article for the Times about the explosion of species art. Butch had grown to a full meter the past year and needed a twenty-kilo nutrient pot. My piece covered the laws that sprang up to curtail cruelty and misuse, and how the legal system created a bizarre and dangerous underground of species art. The article had generated fame for Butch, which contributed to his current value.

The glass from the broken sliding door clinked into the trash from my dustpan when Brea returned. “What happened?” she asked. She gasped when she noticed Butch’s empty table. “Did somebody—”

“Yes, I’m sorry-”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Brea was shrill, reacting far worse than I had anticipated.

“I called someone, someone that could do something.”

“Not the police.”

“No, no, a private investigator.”

“Can we afford that?”

“Well…”

“Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. We need Butch back.” She hugged me. I always loved the feel of her hugs, since Brea stood a foot taller than I. She could toss me across the room if she wanted. Her six-foot plus height drew stares when we were out. “Maybe you did the right thing, but you should have sent word.”

“I didn’t want to distract you.”

“So? This is a family emergency. I would’ve left things to the assistant coach.” Brea coached volleyball at the high school.

In the kitchen she uncorked a bottle of wine. Only a glass for herself was poured. Brea was truly sad. I hadn’t realized just how attached she was to Butch.

I pulled a chair and took her hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. This guy Vadim is good. He came recommended by another journo. Solid. Look.” I put the suspect’s constructed face on my phone, cycling from age twenty through fifty.

She flinched before her eyes hardened. “So, he’s looking for this guy right now?”

“Oh yes.”

“Poor Butch may have been sold already.” The remainder of the wine in the glass vanished and was replenished.

“Our guy will track him down. He’s a bloodhound.” I gave her hand a squeeze and she pulled away, her emotions in a roil.

“Okay.”

“And this might make a good story.”

Brea sighed her annoyed sigh. “You promised.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Maybe not.”

No more articles involving family. My two-part hit on underground casinos was still a sore spot. I thought we had moved on (that was more than two years ago!), but I guess not. I didn’t know her father was involved until I started really digging. And her uncle. Well, her dad served his time and we’re still estranged from her side of the family. It’s a taboo subject. She maintained that I should have given up on the story when I learned it involved family.

But the story was too good. I scored a New York Press Club award. And I don’t mind the estrangement.

#

Vadim

The face search turned up a few possibles in a 200-mile radius. The one that caught my eye was the chemistry teacher at Brea’s high school, Clemens. Did I call that one or what? Wasn’t my badass sleuthing skills; spouses screwing around was so common. I know.

I made a coffee shop stop with the artist, Pascale. What a peacock. He said he’s in an “eyeball” phase and showed up wearing a brown scaley bowler of protruding chameleon eyes that rolled around looking everywhere. Made me feel a little…looked at.

Once I had him comfortable that I wasn’t the law and I had no interest in his relationship with the law, he gave me a few leads on some black-market shops. He told me that I didn’t look like a buyer since I didn’t have any live merch. He hooked me up. Likely more out of his desire to play dress-up than anything else.

His studio smelled like a zoo, all musky and fishy and like a dirty hamster cage. He eyed me up like a tailor and I followed him to a closet filled with jackets on hangars, mostly scales and eyes. “Something low-maintenance,” I said.

He looked like I just ruined his day, closed that closet and opened another. Feathers. Great. “I try to be not so flashy.”

“Here’s where you need a little guidance, my good sir,” Pascale said. “If you’re not ‘flashy,’ as you say, no one’s going to believe you’re for real.”

I ended up with a jacket feathered from the genes of Amazonia’s Crimson Topaz, all black and scarlet with dashes of green. When I pulled the lapels forward the beaks behind started chirping. Their song wasn’t nearly as wild as their feathers. Pascale assured me that the bird-eye fedora of the Yellow Conure was perfect. I looked like a goddamn clown. “Is this hat gonna shit in my hair?”

He rolled his eyes as he texted me care instructions. “If I don’t get these back I’ll send you the bill.”

“Send that to my client,” I said, still checking myself out in the mirror. “No, send it to me, then I’ll send it to him marked up. For my troubles.” And another surcharge for embarrassment.

I doffed my ridiculous hat that felt like a legless bird sitting up there, little hearts beating, incubating my skull as if it were a huge-ass egg.

Later I made a few minor internet crypto purchases at the recommended shops to pry up a lead. The first pickup was in the basement of a sketchy quadplex, likely one big house a hundred years back.

At the door I gave the required verbal code and was greeted by Erma in a pink bathrobe who looked to be about a hundred herself. “You’re a subtle one,” she said, looking me up and down.

That artist effete didn’t know his shit after all. “I like what I like,” I said, keeping up the shtick.

She waved me in, and down the cracked concrete stairs we went, half the LEDS in the ceiling dead. The steel door at the bottom stood open, and on the unpainted cinder brick wall inside hung faces, six rows high, in all skin tones and ages. The ones with eyes looked at me, blinking and silent. Erma paused at one that was heavy-lidded and droopy. She slapped it a few times and it didn’t respond. Frowning, she yanked it from the wall, disconnected the nutrient tube and stuffed the dead thing in her robe pocket.

She turned, noticing I was captivated by the faces. “Need a mask, too?”

“Maybe,” I replied.

“Just a face? Need matching hands?”

“A face.”

“Usually takes an hour of wearing it before it chameleons to your skin color.”

I pointed to a handsome one with a big chin and green eyes. It never once took its gaze from me.

“That’s decor, sweet buns. Pick a mask. One with no eyes.”

It’s not good to look stupid. “So, can you grow a custom from code?”

“Of course. And program a vbox with it, too, if you like.”

A voice box. Nice. “All right. Let’s nix my singing lizard head and put that dough on something custom.” I pulled my palette from a downy interior jacket pocket, readied the DNA code and cast it to her watch. The skin of her hands was smooth, young, unblemished. Erma wore the mask of a crone.

She nodded as the data propagated. “All right, let me get things going in the office.” She turned to leave, but paused. “Cameras are everywhere. Don’t try to steal or fuck anything. I’ll only be gone five minutes for a code check and a vat start.”

As she left me alone with the wall of masks, an attractive female face with long blue hair and full lips, second row from top, winked at me. 

#

Vadim

The mask of suspect Clemens felt warm and clingy as I cupped it to my face, per instructions. It crawled over my skin, moist, the heat intensifying as it affixed the eye holes, nostrils, and mouth correctly and independently. There was a flash of heat. “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered through clenched teeth before the heat let up. In the mirror I watched this thing do its work, rippling slowly, like a jellyfish of human flesh. After ten minutes the movement stopped.

I had black, bushy eyebrows, some sort of Texas mustache, a wide nose, and lips about twice the size of my own.

Shit, forgot the contacts. And now, blue eyes.

I was ready.

With some padding for the belly and a hoody hiding my hair, I headed to Owen’s and knocked on the door. He wasn’t home, but I knew who was.

Brea answered. Her eyes wide, she hissed, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Almost everything I needed to know was in that greeting. “But I got the money,” I replied with a smile, almost flinching at the bass voice rolling off my tongue.

“Get off the damn porch.” Brea pulled me inside. This woman wasn’t just tall, she had strength. I seriously hoped this wouldn’t end in a fistfight. I really didn’t expect to make it inside—this disguise had its limits.

“How much did we get?” she asked, eyes smiling.

“Forty-five K.”

“Perfect!” She clapped her hands. “We’ll have ten thousand leftover. Each. Did you get in touch with your guy?”

Suddenly, there was more, a purpose for the money beyond having more money. I really wished everything had stopped on the porch. “Not yet,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

“You said you’d get him two days ago!”

“It didn’t go like that. Tomorrow, now. Hey, I just dropped by with the—”

“All right then. Let me know what happens. But don’t just show up here!”

“Got it, sorry.”

I turned to grab the doorknob when she pinched my ass.

“Huh. You’re losing weight.”

Shit. “Thanks.” I hustled down the porch steps.

“I didn’t mean you had to run off this second!” she called after me.

#

Owen

Vadim went over the latest expenses via voice link. The retainer was slipping down the drain. Then he got quiet. “What else?” I asked, tapping my pen on the glass top of my home workspace. He had interrupted my flow on an article.

“I’ll just spit it out,” he started. But stopped.

“Well?”

“It’s your wife. She’s screwing the chemistry teacher and it’s her and him together stealing your plant. Butch.”

“No. Don’t—” I tried to sit there in obstinate denial, but too many things clicked. My guts knotted; cold sweat slicked my forehead. My mind resisted the reality spelled out for me. Me and Brea weren’t perfect, but we were okay, right?

In my stunned silence Vadim shared the details, and not too delicately. In a haze I made it to the wine rack and opened a bottle of something red and Italian. After the cork, I retrieved no glass.

“And something else,” Vadim continued. “That extra bit of cash? That’s the price of a hitman, my friend.” This guy was not my friend.

I laughed some weird, forced barking sound that I did not recognize as mine. “That’s just stupid. I got to go.” I clicked off, dizzy, nauseous, angry.

I’ve seen the teacher Clemens at a few faculty functions, but his face on Vadim’s palette didn’t ring any bells. I know Brea. All right, not as well as I had thought, but she’s not a killer. Her family was sketchy, but not the killer type of mobsters. She didn’t want that sleazy life and left them behind except for holidays. A coldness ran through the marriage back when her father was arrested, but that business was years ago and she stayed here. With me.

I took a serious quaff from the bottle and wished the effects would hurry. We’d met at a bar back in college, where she saw me and patted my head like I was a cute puppy. Both humiliated and turned on, I allowed the tequila in me to ask for her number. “So maybe you can pet me some more later.” We joked about that for years.

But never again after that casino piece. I should have realized what had happened, that something had broken in the relationship.

I remembered Brea slow-burned revenge on a cousin that didn’t include her in the bridal party. Years after, when Brea was in charge of the invites for her sister’s family trip to St. Lucia, she simply deleted that cousin’s invite.

Now she slow-burned on me.

After the bottle emptied I broke down for a cry, but I vowed no confrontation. I acted as normally as possible when she returned. Sensing something amiss, she asked if I was okay. I attributed it to work stress. And being a little drunk due to work stress. Jesus, she was screwing a guy way below my league, except maybe for height. It hurt, it really hurt.

But she didn’t want to kill me, right?

I smiled and pretended. For the story. Wouldn’t that be the sharpest, most painful revenge? Public shaming.

Story in development.

#

Vadim

A day after my encounter with Brea I parked outside Clemens’ place around noon and I checked his face in my visor mirror: droopy below the eyes. It was starting to die and stunk like athlete’s foot. Nothing bought on the black market is exactly guaranteed. I splashed on more cologne. I walked through Clemen’s overgrown, weedy yard. The neighborhood wasn’t shab: a regular working-joe street of small brick ranches. Clemens just didn’t like mowing much, I guessed. I hoped a neighbor wouldn’t walk up to complain.

At the back door I clumsily managed to get his ancient deadlock jammed in the locked position. Frustrated, I kicked the door in, splintering the wood frame. Quieter than breaking a window.

The kitchen was overrun with dirty dishes. Two old slate computers sat on the table. One was running, the other likely dead for years, thick with dust and two dirty glasses perched there.

It only took a minute to see that Butch wasn’t here or in the garage. Back at Clemens’ running slate, which was not password protected, I rummaged about looking for recent purchases. Huh. A recent rental of a storage unit. Next stop.

Sadie’s U-Store-It was old and outdated and certainly not climate-controlled. I rented myself a unit from the old guy at the desk who applied cologne like mosquito repellent. More than me, and I was dealing with a stink problem. “Need another one, eh?” The gent had a brain for faces. I drove down the rows looking for Clemens’ original unit: 313. He thought he was extra-secure, with two padlocks, DNA-coded. I stooped to rub my skin mask on the sensors. Easy.

The roll-up door squealed as it opened. There was Butch, I assumed, under a green tarp. I rolled the door shut behind me and pulled the tarp. The bird heads stirred, but didn’t sing. Feathers covered the floor below and Butch showed bare, rashy skin patches. Butch was sick. The nutrient pod was depleted.

I had a full water bottle in the car and I poured the whole thing into the little mouths of the lower ring. Only then did a few of the heads chirp all weak like they had sore throats.

A run to the nearby art species supply netted me two liters of mid-grade nutrient, so I refilled the pod for Butch. No one was going to sell this thing half-dead. Hardly worth a damn like this. I needed to think of my commission. I would have loaded Butch up right then but I have a car, not a van or a truck. Butch was big and awkward and heavy.

After retarping the birdhead plant I headed back to the high school. It was about to let out and I wanted a little more spy-time on Clemens and his side chick. I caught them just driving from the parking lot, Brea riding shotgun. I tailed them to a skeeze neighborhood of once proud brownstones now weathered to cracked steps, broken windows, and underground ventures. They must have known what they were shopping for, they were in and out in ten minutes with a cubic foot cardboard box, heavily taped. Both smiled as they walked. Lovebirds get on my nerves.

I rifle micced their convo as they headed back to Clemens’ car. Brea said, “Tonight! Finally!”

Clemens, as he opened the driver’s door: “I’ll see if the truck’s available.”

Truck. Must be for picking up Butch and getting him to the buyer. I had to be there first.

#

Owen

Vadim sent me a pic of Butch. Ouch. He looked on the verge of death. Vadim needed me ASAP to help pull Butch from storage before Brea and Clemens did. I rescheduled an interview. The bigger story was Butch and the thieves. My cheating wife the thief, specifically.

At the gate I waited in my car for Vadim with the rental van, since I had no way in. Fifteen minutes and the U-Haul pulled up. But the guy in the cab buzzing down the window wasn’t Vadim—it was Clemens, looking puffy-faced with dark circles beneath his eyes. The man was sick.

Rage took hold. I wanted to smash his smug wife-screwing face, but I couldn’t be an angry, violent husband in the story. “Get in,” he said, voice edged with urgency.

“What? Why would I get in with you?”

“I thought you were here to help me with Butch?”

I couldn’t reply, stunned into silent confusion.

Clemens touched his neck below that unfashionable gray hoody and said, “It’s me, get in.” Ah, a different voice: Vadim.

I climbed in the passenger side eyeing him warily. The cab smelled of old French fries and Vadim didn’t smell right, either, like an old corpse pickled in cologne. He explained species masks as we pulled up to the unit. He pressed his Clemens face to the first lock and nothing happened. Vadim cursed and tried again, pressing his cheek hard against the sensor.

Another vehicle approached down the aisle, a pickup truck with two occupants. Clemens got out. He must have remote-canceled the locks when he arrived at the gate, the manager sensing trouble at two identical Clemenses. The wife-screwing Clemens in front of me shouted, “What are you do—” he stopped mid-step and mid-word as he recognized an ill version of his own face on Vadim.

Brea hopped out, baseball cap perched on her head, a box clutched to her chest, and sneakers pumping hard and away: down the aisle behind the truck. What was she doing? And was that a disguise? I almost called to her, but Vadim thumbed to the roll-up door and said in Clemen’s voice, “You got stolen property in here. Wanna wait here for the cops?”

Clemens’ eyes widened, but his worn leather shoes stayed rooted.

“You’re welcome to take off,” said Vadim as he tapped 911 on his watch.

Clemens walked backwards, slowly, hand on the hood of the truck for guidance. He climbed in.

Vadim smiled, and the bottom half of the lip, gray, peeled down and hung, swaying as he spoke into his watch, “I’m reporting stolen—” He screamed as a potted, thorny plant broke across his head.

Brea had come up behind us and now sprinted by to the truck, and I couldn’t keep it in any longer, my shattered heart bleeding out in a ghetto storage lot. “Why?” I shouted at her. “Why are you leaving me?”

She leapt into the truck but before she closed the door she gave me the finger and said, “Because you’ll never change! News stories first, me second! Everything first but me!” She slammed the door and rubber squealed as Clemens gunned it to run me and Vadim over.

I leapt toward the closed roll-up door and flattened next to Vadim, who stood crookedly in raging pain, oblivious to everything as he clawed at his faces, fleshy chunks sloughing. He yelped in Clemens’ voice as Clemens rolled over his foot.

Clemens stomped the brakes since our van blocked the aisle. The truck reversed, leaving me and Vadim with the pungent scent of burning rubber.

Vadim leaned against the door pulling at the mask as he grunted, scarlet welts swelling as I watched, frozen. “Stings like fuck!” he muttered through clenched teeth. Coming away in strips, his mask wafted a powerful odor of rancid meat.

On the weedy, cracked concrete lay the broken nutrient pot of the art species that Brea had thrown: writhing vines, violet flowers, and inch-long needle-thorns dripping a clear liquid. Vadim was damn lucky that thing didn’t wrap itself around his head. He would have been blinded first and dead soon enough.

“We need to get you to the hospital,” I said as I gripped his arm and half-dragged him to the van, only one of his feet able to hold weight. Dead swathes of gray skin shed in clingy, wet strips and fell, revealing the Vadim I knew but damaged and tormented. Several visible welts grew alarmingly on his real skin.

He belted in and I gunned the gas. Down the row, a turn down an aisle, then to the gate: closed, and not sliding open. “Hey!” I shouted to the white-haired man in the office that stood by the window, arms crossed and brow chiseled in anger. “We have a medical emergency here!”

He slid up the glass and yelled through the screen. “You broke into a shed! You’re staying here for the police!”

I looked to the gate, a formidable thing, black iron bars. The van had some girth, but crashing through wasn’t remotely possible. “He might die if I don’t get him to the hospital!”

“I’ll call an ambulance, then.”

Vadim looked seriously injured, and it wasn’t just the remnants of the dead mask clinging to his face. His real skin, the left side of his face, continued swelling. The red irritation shifted to a purplish, bruised hellscape. His growing flesh had swallowed one of his eyes the other stared, clear, comprehending, and a little scared. He reached in his vest and pulled a chrome sidearm.

“Shit, Vadim, don’t—”

“Ambulances take forever out here.”

I sat rigid as he leaned over me and aimed through the window. “Open it,” he said, words slurred through swollen lips.

The gate slid open.

#

Vadim

I guess Brea still liked her husband, a least a little bit, since she’d spiked that killer art species on me and not him. The thorns secreted a neurotoxin with a powerful necrotizing cocktail. More surgery and gene therapy were scheduled to put my pretty face back right, since I was ugly as a backwoods shithole and scaring clients.

Lucky to be alive. Ain’t the first time I said that.

Anyway, Owen visited and said he’s nursing Butch back to health and planned to sell him to pay my bills. I swear he was fishing around for me to offer to cancel the whole deal in exchange for him saving my life. First, his business got me into this whole mess. Second, I’m alive and I have bills. If I were dead I wouldn’t need the money.

The cops caught up to Brea and Clemens. They were teachers, not criminals. Lack of experience. Brea was charged with attempted murder, among other things. Good.

Owen wrote his story for the Times. What a goddamned crock. I found his Butch and discovered his wife’s shenanigans, took a damn murder beast to the face and he goes making me look like a low-rent sleaze.

Fuck that guy. His bill just went up.